Blue Eyed vs. Brown Eyed Experiment

In 1968 Jane Elliot developed what would be one of the most controversial psychological experiments despite her not being a psychologist. She was originally inspired by the unfortunate assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. To give them a hands on experience she split the class into a blue-eyed group and a brown-eyed group. After this split she told her students that one group's eye color is better than the other group's eye color. It took less than a day for the group told they were better than the other group to treat the "lesser" group crueler. What the students didn't know is that Elliot would later switch the groups in terms of who was "superior." The experiment received lots of attention for its ingenuity and controversy as far as consent. With Elliot's success she later changed her career to diversity training and repeated the experiment in 1969 and 1970 where most of her students still regarded the experiment as life changing.

I find this experiment to be very relatable to our class's time spent studying social influence considering that the students had rapid changing opinions of each other that was seemingly heightened by the split in eye color. I also like how this experiment made the point of discrimination because I think that people back down in speaking out in groups that are predominately prejudice. This information should be used to make people more tolerate because it gives evidence that whatever people's prejudices is "based on" is not factual-but rather socially influenced.